Increasing requirements for including an effective means of electrical shock protection in the design of appliances has created an industry focus on ways and means of achieving it at acceptable cost.
Since conditions of greatest electrical shock hazard have been generally established to exist wherever appliances are used around water, and more particularly under conditions affording immersion, such as the bathroom, relatively simple devices specifically offering immersion protection could provide shock protection in a majority of hazardous instances and can normally be produced at lower cost than ground fault circuit interrupters or my own Universal Fault Circuit Interrupters (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,997,818 and 4,707,759) which are designed to protect under a broader spectrum of hazardous conditions. It is believed that the present invention can be made at lower cost than any other known Immersion Detection Circuit Interrupter (I.D.C.I.), without sacrificing reliability, even less than the I.D.C.I. described in my prior pending U.S. application Ser. No. 07/554,714 filed Jul. 17, 1990, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,159,517, dated Oct. 27, 1992. The expense of electromagnetic switching devices and load current carrying contacts are avoided and where solid state devices are employed, their closed mode of failure is made to represent a positive fail-safe factor rather than a negative consideration.